Cody Eddings, the founder of Snap Refund, reveals how he raised a $100k pre-seed round.
Fundraising is hard. Fundraising while you continue product development and market research is doubly hard. Still, Cody Eddings managed to pull this off – he raised a $100k seed round for his startup.
Cody is building SnapRefund:
It empowers insurance businesses with a digital payment platform that sends instant claim payments. Either as a standalone payment portal, or as an integration with your CMS to automate claim approval, SnapRefund settles payments to insureds in seconds, even on nights and weekends; creating new revenue streams, simplifying operations, and vastly improving the customer experience.
Round details
- Company name: SnapRefund
- Round size: $100,000
- Stage: Seed
- Date: July 2022
How long did it take you to raise the round?
We were fundraising for about 1 year before we raised our $100k round from Northwestern Mutual & gener8tor.
That time was interspersed with lots of time spent on product development, market research, and participation in two accelerators.
How many investors did you talk to?
We started off with a target list of around 200 prospect investors, spoke to about 1/4th of them, and converted 1 of them into an actual investor.
What tools did you use?
Gmail, LinkedIn, Google Meet/Zoom/Teams, and Google Sheets were indispensable tools for us to find, reach, and track progress with our investor prospects.
What was the hardest thing in your fundraising?
There wasn’t a single “hardest part” about fundraising our last round. The entire process is an exhausting slog through countless conversations with people who usually won’t see value in you and your business and often believe themselves to be experts at business as a whole. Egos are often big and the people writing checks have just as much bias as anyone else, leading to egregious disparities in who gets funding (only ~2% of black founders get VC investment as of 2022).
It’s human nature to be drained by that after enough time.
Fundraising advice/hacks for founders?
Warm intros are a great head start. Beyond that, creating a cyclical newsletter for friends of your company is a great badge of transparency that makes VCs feel more connected to your journey and more willing to jump in to invest when you’re ready.
The best advice I can give: keep going, and remember that your customers are the ultimate priority! Traction is the ultimate panacea, and if you can prove your business has legs VCs will be reaching out to YOU
Support
Thanks for reading!
Follow Cody on LinkedIn. Also, check out SnapRefund. With it, your business can move money in seconds.
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P.S: Cody contacted over 200+ investors. With Shizune, you can find 250+ investors in your industry and stage in <30 seconds.
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P.S.2: Have questions for Cody or me? Join the discussion:
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